Indeed, there is "no evidence to support the theory sometimes proposed by students of the Voynich manuscript that Voynich himself was involved in the production of forgeries" (Hunt 16). Though this lead yielded no fruit, Voynich continued to refer to the document as the "Roger Bacon Cipher" until his death in 1930. Voynich's adamant belief in Bacon's link to the document derives from a letter that he found tucked inside its pages addressed to its previous owner, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), in which Johannes Marcus Marci (1595-1667) explicitly claims Bacon to be the author. Voynich certainly believed that his find was worth a great sum of money, but he also publicly declared that he believed the manuscript to be the work of thirteenth-century alchemist Roger Bacon. Once again, however, this argument is riddled with holes. For starters, who would have the money, the time, or the gall to create such a thing? The likeliest suspect is Voynich himself, who in a fit of greed may have fabricated the manuscript with the intent of reselling it for a pretty penny (he did estimate its value at around $100,000). This theory is particularly underwhelming, for as Eamon Duffy puts it in his article " Secret Knowledge -or a Hoax?": "it's hard to imagine a punchline that required so elaborate a build-up." To put such painstaking effort into an over-two-hundred-page-long document that would have required some fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins to manufacture seems unfathomable.
One of the more common arguments is that the Voynich manuscript is merely an elaborate hoax. Yet despite its five hundred year tenure on this Earth, there has yet to be one person who truly understands what the text says, or what its strange pictures are trying to convey. Carbon dating of the parchment tells us that the manuscript was likely written in the early fifteenth century. The document itself is quite striking: the text is written on vellum in brown ink, and the drawings are coloured with vibrant greens and blues, deep red, and dusty gold.
#Voynich manuscript reddit series
Housed in the Yale Rare Book and Manuscript Library as Beinecke MS 408, the book comprises a series of obscure herbal, astrological, and anatomical illustrations.
#Voynich manuscript reddit code
Often referred to as "the world's most mysterious manuscript", this cryptic, 234 page codex has mystified scholars, linguists, cryptographers, and armchair code breakers since it was purchased by the Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912.
Regardless of the inevitable disappointment that awaits, I am nonetheless going to step up, roll back my sleeves, and join the ranks of those who have tried to pry the sword of meaning from this obstinate block of text. It is a tauntingly enigmatic document that preys on the desperate human desire for understanding, and its allure has trapped smarter folks than I in a vicious cycle of furrowed brows and tugged-out hairs. Theories on its origin and interpretation would be no more out of place as published works in an academic journal than they would be in a conspiratorial conversation shared over pints of beer in a dimly lit pub. The Voynich manuscript is something of an oddity in the world of manuscript studies, as its appeal extends far beyond the hallowed halls of academia.
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